The C word

Aaaaah Easter. Bank holidays aplenty, blissful weather, even a wedding... It's been a pretty wonderful week, surely? However, and I'm prepared for this to sound incredibly pathetic, every time I sit down in my room, I'm forced to start fighting an internal battle with an inner demon of mine. Having waged a war against my mindless ingestion of the foodstuff beginning with C ever since some fairly serious Christmas overindulgence, thanks to Easter I've suddenly found myself back at university with a pile of it in my room. I think I can smell it in bed at night. I can feel it looking at me. It wants me to eat it.

Ok, so that was a bit of an exaggeration, but the Easter proliferation of chocolate in our lives really can precipitate a small crisis. Should I ditch the diet, start stuffing my face and try to get rid of it all quickly so I can start afresh as soon as possible? Should I try to enjoy it responsibly and make it last by only having respectably small quantities at a time? Should I puritanically throw it away, or try to palm it off on some other hapless soul? I'm sure I can't be the only girl who has this problem. It might be an ancient cliché, but in the majority of cases it's true: we love chocolate, often more than is good for us. I've successfully avoided eating chocolate (with the occasional slip-up) for about four and a half months now. I REALLY want to eat these Easter eggs. So, with this in mind, I thought the time might be ripe to investigate the positive aspects of chocolate consumption, to make me (and maybe you, dearest reader) feel a bit better about the amount of it we could be about to eat.

First off, although it sounds fairly obvious (and is a pretty tenuous reason to eat it), chocolate is made from vegetables, and therefore contains antioxidants which can fight off free radicals and therefore prevents aging and heart disease. Boom. Fantastic. According to the BBC, Italian scientists also found that the blood pressure of test subjects eating 100g of dark chocolate a day for 15 days went down because of these antioxidants. The body's ability to metabolise sugar also improved.

Wikipedia even claims that melting chocolate in your mouth can produce an increase in brain activity and heart rate that is more intense than that associated with passionate kissing, and which lasts four times as long afterwards. The webpage also asserts that chocolate can boost cognitive abilities- surely something everyone needs at the start of term.

And if all of that wasn't enough to convince me, livescience.com tells us that chocolate eaters are 22% less likely to suffer a stroke than those who don't eat any, and that it may have anti-cancer benefits, again because of the antioxidants it contains. It even has vitamins and minerals in it.

Surely, when there are this many health benefits to eating chocolate (never mind that most of these statistics are based around miniscule portions of dark chocolate), a few calories here or there won't matter? Pass me that egg, I'm starting now!

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